The School That LEGO Built

A child plays with toy bricks at the new LEGO school in Billund, Denmark.

LEGO has a new product, but families need to move to the middle of Denmark to get their hands on it.

The Danish company has opened a school in its hometown of Billund to meet the needs of an increasing number of international families moving to the small city to work for the toymaking powerhouse. Long the lifeblood of the small Danish town, LEGO is looking the polish Billund’s image as an attractive place to live.

The LEGO Foundation opened the English-speaking international school this month. In its first year, the school caters to 80 kids from kindergarten and to third grade, using the Danish education requirements as a template for learning. The plan is to expand in a few years to offer education all the way up to high school.

But this promises to be the furthest thing from an institute of ordinary learning. At the LEGO school, kids are guaranteed to take play seriously.

“The core is creativity and play,” Camille Uhre Fog, the chairman of the school board, said in an interview. “All schools talk about imagination and creativity, but we’re going to take it to the extreme.”

Thanks to its founder, the school believes it has the “edge” when it comes to creative play.

The school isn’t just for children with parents collecting a LEGO paycheck. Paul Hansford, a British writer from the U.K. who lives in Billund with his Danish wife, is sending his 4-year-old son Lucas to the kindergarten. For these parents, the play aspect is only part of the equation.

“It’s hard for Billund to compete with cities like London, Paris and Munich and other hubs around the world,” Hansford said. “If you have a school where you know the kids are going to be educated in their mother tongue it’s a really good selling point when they are recruiting….[even] non-LEGO parents will benefit from that.”

But the real perks come in the form of an endless supply of plastic bricks. “There’s no limit to that brick,” Fog said. “And if you give those bricks to kids, magic will happen.”

Having a LEGO factory next door will ensure ample inventory. In order to effectively utilize the toys, the school’s staff — including caretakers and secretaries — is trained to use LEGO’s educational products that come from the branch of the company that creates products developed to be used in classroom settings.

One of the main tools for learning will be LEGO WeDo, a sort of junior version of Lego Mindstorms, which are products used to build and program Lego robots. For parents, workshops are offered to better understand how plastic bricks fit in the education of their children.

LEGO

The Mindstorm robot is a key staple of learning at the LEGO school.

Fog, however, was quick to emphasize that the school is founded by LEGO’s charitable foundation and therefore independent. That means it can choose its collaboration partners as it sees fit.

Parents have gotten the message. “They’re keen to distance themselves from LEGO,” Hansford said. “They don’t want to make it seem like this big company is brainwashing the kids into buying LEGO.”

Creativity, said Fog, is the main building block of a LEGO education, and many tools can be used to feed imagination.

This is where LEGO’s people fit in to the equation. Fog says designers from Lego will share their knowledge with kids about the creative process, for instance.

“You probably wouldn’t get that in many schools around the world, and that’s unique about Billund and where it is,” Hansford said. “It’s a small town but it has this big multinational company here with all these kinds of assets that they have. If the school can pull on those assets and get them involved its quite exciting for the kids. And if the parents can come as well, it could be quite good for some of the parents as well.”

Hansford likely will be first in line for programs aimed at parents: “I know my way around a Lego instruction booklet, let’s put it that way.”

About Speakeasy

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